Teachers in Arizona have been singled about because of their Spanish accents [NYT]. Dreher takes a step back:
It’s not as bad today as it was when I was growing up, but it’s still the case that having a pronounced Southern accent gets you branded by many people up North as a hick. It’s unfair and it’s untrue, but this is how it goes. In the UK, of course, class politics having to do with one’s accent are even more pronounced, and vicious. Anyway, I love the accent of the part of the South where I was raised, and would resent the hell out of it if the government took it upon itself to send in agents to punish teachers for not speaking its idea of standard English pronunciation.
So what if a teacher says “waw-tah” instead of “wah-terr”? In my town, black folks and white folks pronounce some words differently. For example, black folks say “Bat’n RUDGE” for the capital city, while whites say “Bat’n ROOZH.” Nobody corrected anybody else; everybody knew what was being said by the other. In point of fact, both blacks and whites pronounced “Baton Rouge” incorrectly — the original French is “Ba-tawhn ROOZH” — but so what? French people don’t live there; American people do, and that’s how they say it.
I take Rod's point – as long as teachers remain comprehensible to their students. My own accent made its biggest shift when I realized that half of what I was saying when teaching moral philosophy at Harvard to undergraduates was lost on them. When an Englishman says "Aristotle" it's almost one guttral syllable. The blank looks forced me to slow down the pace of my speech and lengthen the vowels. Arrristaatttle. It worked.
The Dish 